Almost every individual has a measurable deterioration of cognitive abilities as he or she ages. The experience of this decline may begin with occasional lapses in memory in one's thirties, such as increasing difficulty in remembering names and faces, and often progresses to more frequent lapses as one ages in which there is passing difficulty recalling the names of objects, or remembering a sequence of instructions to follow directions from one place to another. Typically, such decline accelerates in one's fifties and over subsequent decades, such that these lapses become noticeably more frequent. This is commonly dismissed as simply “a senior moment” or “getting older.” In reality, this decline is to be expected and is predictable. It is often clinically referred to as “age-related cognitive decline,” or “age-associated memory impairment.” While often viewed (especially against more serious illnesses) as benign, such predictable age-related cognitive decline can severely alter quality of life by making daily tasks (e.g., driving a car, remembering the names of old friends) difficult.
An important part of navigating everyday life is being able to recognize a familiar face and accurately associate it with a proper name. This ability is fundamental to personal, social, and professional life experiences. It is important to be able to correctly remember face-name associations in many environments encountered regularly, such as work, school, residential communities, and recreational activities that have a social component.
On the most basic level, this task requires the individual to first identify a face, to recall the appropriate name, and then finally be able to successfully associate or bind the two together. There is general agreement in literature on cognitive aging that episodic, recognition memory functioning declines with age. The degraded representational fidelity of the visual system in older adults causes an additional difficulty in the ability of older adults to store and use information in working memory. Anecdotal evidence indicates that a major complaint of older adults is their inability to recall the appropriate name of a familiar face they have seen in the past. What is less clear, however, is whether the inability to remember names of people is due to the reduced representational fidelity of the features (i.e., faces) of the person and the name per se, or whether there is a selective deficit for encoding and storing the face-name association. The associative deficit hypothesis (ADH) states that the loss in memory for people's names is due primarily to the inability to encode and store the face-name association. Results from ADH studies indicate that older and younger adults with similar performances on a face recognition task and a proper name recognition task differed significantly in their performance on a name-face associative recognition task. While there is generally a loss in representational fidelity for visual and verbal information in normal aging, results from ADH studies and related work suggests that there is an additional and selective deficit for face-name association related to age.
There have been efforts made to alleviate this problem. For example, online employee directories have been created to allow employees to search for people by last name, department and other factors to help get familiar with other employees. Mnemonic methods have also been suggested as a learning strategy that can assist in name/face association. Although these strategies are useful to some extent, they are limited because they do not employ strategies based on current knowledge of brain plasticity and methods for optimizing learning through attention, reward and novelty.
In many older adults, age-related cognitive decline leads to a more severe condition now known as Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), in which sufferers show specific sharp declines in cognitive function relative to their historical lifetime abilities while not meeting the formal clinical criteria for dementia. MCI is now recognized to be a likely prodromal condition to Alzheimer's Disease (AD) which represents the final collapse of cognitive abilities in an older adult. The development of novel therapies to prevent the onset of this devastating neurological disorder is a key goal for modern medical science.
The majority of the experimental efforts directed toward developing new strategies for ameliorating the cognitive and memory impacts of aging have focused on blocking and possibly reversing the pathological processes associated with the physical deterioration of the brain. However, the positive benefits provided by available therapeutic approaches (most notably, the cholinesterase inhibitors) have been modest to date in AD, and are not approved for earlier stages of memory and cognitive loss such as age-related cognitive decline and MCI.
Cognitive training is another potentially potent therapeutic approach to the problems of age-related cognitive decline, MCI, and AD. This approach typically employs computer- or clinician-guided training to teach subjects cognitive strategies to mitigate their memory loss. Although moderate gains in memory and cognitive abilities have been recorded with cognitive training, the general applicability of this approach has been significantly limited by two factors: 1) Lack of Generalization; and 2) Lack of enduring effect.
Lack of Generalization: Training benefits typically do not generalize beyond the trained skills to other types of cognitive tasks or to other “real-world” behavioral abilities. As a result, effecting significant changes in overall cognitive status would require exhaustive training of all relevant abilities, which is typically infeasible given time constraints on training.
Lack of Enduring Effect: Training benefits generally do not endure for significant periods of time following the end of training. As a result, cognitive training has appeared infeasible given the time available for training sessions, particularly from people who suffer only early cognitive impairments and may still be quite busy with daily activities.
As a result of overall moderate efficacy, lack of generalization, and lack of enduring effect, no cognitive training strategies are broadly applied to the problems of age-related cognitive decline, and to date they have had negligible commercial impacts. The applicants believe that a significantly innovative type of training can be developed that will surmount these challenges and lead to fundamental improvements in the treatment of age-related cognitive decline. This innovation is based on a deep understanding of the science of “brain plasticity” that has emerged from basic research in neuroscience over the past twenty years, which only now through the application of computer technology can be brought out of the laboratory and into the everyday therapeutic treatment.
Thus, improved systems and methods for improving the ability of the visual nervous system of a participant to associate faces and names are desired.